Automated Timecode Update for Adobe Premiere Pro 14.5+ (CC 2020) and Bridge 10.0+ (CC 2020)

Made for .csv files exported by Tentacle Timecode Tool 1.16.

Automated processing

This CEP HTML plugin changes start times of media files (can be any, except sequences) in a Premiere Pro project.

Important: Media files are not changed. Only XMP Metadata is updated. Use at your own risk.

There is no guarantee every editing software is capable of interpreting Adobe XMP metadata.

Premiere Pro - Correction panel

Bridge - correction panel in csv mode (left) and date mode (right).

Bridge - repair panel used to rebase framerates or fix faulty values.

Why would you need that?

This plugin offers following benefits:

• Fast - it is multiple times faster then baking the timecode with a conversion or manual timecode updates
• Flexible - modifying the .csv file in your spreadsheet app of choice offers to possibility to fix timecode drift or add missing timecode if a conversion should have failed. (Out of the box Premiere offers nothing comparable besides changing every file one by one.)
• Non destructive - original start time / time code will not be overwritten (when possible)
• Framerating mixing - automatically converts different timebases (e.g. from a 25 fps source to a 30 fps file).

Requirements

Your Premiere Pro has to at least support Adobe CEP plugins.

Tested with:

• Premiere Pro 14.7 (CC 2020)
• Premiere Pro 14.5 (CC 2020)
• Bridge 12.0.0.234 (CC 2022)
• Bridge 13.0.0.562 (CC 2023)
• Bridge 14.0.1.137 (CC 2024)

Differences between Premiere and Bridge

Premiere Pro

This version works as the previous update. In further testing it turned out, that Premiere doesn't change metadata permanently. You loose the changes if the files are relinked.

Thus the scope was widened to solve the problem in Bridge.

Bridge

Works similarly to the Premiere version.

They share the same panel, but certain features are deactivated for Premiere

This plugin changes permanently changes the file meta data.

Additional Features

• Export timecode stored in metadata to csv
• Revert changed timecodes to previous values
• Fix broken timecodes (fixes a problem that happens when timecodes are added in Premiere Pro)

Installation

Future

This app will be available in Adobe Exchange (also accessible through Creative Cloud Experience PlugIns).

Manual installation

See also PProPanel Docs.

Put the plugin folder into these directiories, to have Premiere Pro load it:

Windows:    C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\CEP\extensions
Mac:        /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CEP/extensions

Debug Mode

If you try to run a non signed instance you have to enable PlayerDebugMode.

On Mac, type the following into Terminal, then relaunch Finder (either via rebooting, or from the Force Quit dialog):

defaults write /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.CSXS.10.plist PlayerDebugMode 1

On Windows, make the following registry entry (a new Key, of type String):

Options

After selecting your file, you can select following options to discover the media files you need:

• Start with project bin / selection

  These radio buttons decide whether your selection or the project root / bin are the starting base to search for clips.

• Search in sub bins

  Enabling this option will make the program "open" every folder it discovers. Should be used in caution in combination with selections. Repeating matches will be disgarded, but it might take longer.

• Disable media start comparison

  Enabling this option will disable the comparing of the file timecode parsed from the .csv and the media start time of the clip. It will then only compare the file name and duration, which in an off change lead to false matches.

  This can be used to correct mistakes or bulk revert changes (with swapped .csv columns).

• Enable verbose logging

  Enabling this option will show an extensive log of what is happening in the plugin. Errors contained in the .csv will show up no matter the settings.

  Logging levels

  • CRIT - plugin errors (e.g. settings invalid etc.)
  • ERR - mistakes in the .csv
  • INFO - normal program routines
  • STAT - errors that disrupted the process

These settings will not be stored between program updates!

.CSV content / Manual input

If a .csv spreadsheet is created without the tentacle timecode tool, it has to contain "File Name", "Duration", "File TC", "Audio TC" and "Framerate" in this order.

The .csv string is as following:

File Name,Duration,File TC,Audio TC,Framerate
"TestName.MOV","00:00:05","15:21:06:07","08:22:12:18","25.00"

Tentacle Timecode Tool only stores hh:mm:ss for durations, but frames can be inserted in this section. The match will work anyways.

Safety

It was important for me to get a quick overview on mistakes that might have come up during import, so one can fix it easily. Especially for the more critical process of settings timecodes, where finding mistakes can take a long time. For this reason a log area is implement, which shows errors or a verbose process status.

If an error in the csv is discovered at the parsing stage, it will push a log message inside the gui with the cause of failure.

The process will stop if the file is not a .csv, header information of the .csv is incomplete, the rows are missing columns etc. .

Parsing single rows will give a warning for every file that couldn't be processed.

At the end every successful change will be logged only if verbose logging is enabled.

Known Issues

• High Framerate Files don't match File duration is used to pick the correct files. Tentacle only outputs duration down to the second. Which can lead to rounding errors in combination with highframerate footage. In this case the duration in the .csv should be rounded down.

• WAV Files don't update their metadata The metadata is always changed by the plugin. For an yet unknown reason Bridge doesn't retain the changed metadata, even after the new one was provided. Currently Metadata of wav files can be changed after a restart of Bridge.

  Version history

Current

in progess

Previous

Changelist

• 0.3.0 <-> 01.02.2024 (Focus on Bridge)

  • Complete rework of the "backend" code
  • Repair part moved into it's own panel
  • Small bug fixes

• 0.2.2 <-> 13.11.2022

  • Timecode metadata can now be exported to csv (Bridge only)
  • Timecode related metadata in audio files is handled better (Bridge only)
  • Missing timecodes are no longer "undefined" -> 00:00:00:00 (Bridge only)
  • Paneltext can't be accidentally selected anymore
  • Selection and root start was switched (Bridge only)
  • CSS tweaks

• 0.2.1 <-> 10.01.2022

  • Add Bridge as extension host
  • Rewrite the pipeline to update timecodes using thumbnail metadata
  • Add fix for broken xmp metadata (from manual update - Bridge only)
  • Revert feature (Bridge only)
  • Ability to create timecode from file creation date (Bridge only)

• 0.1.0 <-> 11.12.2020

  • Pretesting stage (not tested with a production Premiere Pro Project)
  • CSS design is basically finished
  • Severe bugs have been caught

• 0.0.0 <-> 25.11.2020

  -Development start

Maintenance

This plugin will not be thoroughly maintained. If any bugs occur, it might take a while for them to be fixed. It is just a side project of myself.

Compiling / running the source code

Running the plugin via the source code requires the setting up Premiere Pro for Developement.

Further informations for creating a package out of changed source code can be found under this link as well.

The debugging ports of the panels are listed in ".debug".

Future

This is considered not feature complete yet.

After Bridge is feature complete, then there will only be bug fixes and maintence, since this is just a side project.

If the plugin breaks on newer Premiere versions it will eventually be updated.

Reason

I film with DSLRs cameras providing interal timecode, but not taking external sources. So it is hard to synchronize those files using the benefits of timecode. Thus I record audio timecode via a Tentactle Sync E s.

These audio timecode need to be read by a tool like the Tentacle Timecode Tool and can then be converted to a new media file with the correct time code. Since this takes up a considerable amount of CPU-Time, I have opted to painstackenly update the timecodes by hand. Since this takes up 30 min to several hours per project anyways, I wanted to automate the direct update of the media metadata. It now does work in a few milliseconds to seconds instead of hours.

This could have been implemented as a macro as well. Implementing error detection / correction would have needed extensive programming anywways.

So I opted for making a CEP plugin which integrates seemlessly into Premiere. I wanted an "easier" scope to test CEP plugin development for Premiere, to have a better idea creating future plugins.